Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Before I head out the door to the airport here in Kiev (after spending most of Sunday here), I thought I would quickly put up a non-news, but religion-beat oriented, note from Rod “friend of this blog” Dreher.
One of the hardest things to do in journalism is to do a fair, accurate story when you are covering an emotional, complex issue when one side of the story will not talk to you (especially if lawyers are involved).
One of the ongoing temptations here at GetReligion — for the GetReligionistas as well as the reader/commentators — is to focus on interesting events and trends in religion news, instead of keeping our unique focus on how the mainstream press attempts to cover those stories in an accurate, balanced, professional manner.
The last time that we checked in on the long, slow slide of the nationally known Dallas Morning News religion section, which became the more conventional religion beat, I wrote the following with a cyber-sigh:
So Sunday was Mother’s Day. I hope you all bought your mothers flowers and wrote her a nice poem or something. As is tradition in my family, I did pretty much nothing for my amazing mom other than call her. Mother’s Day is not on the liturgical calendar of my church although I think it’s probably marked more by most American religious institutions than Cantate, which is what Lutherans noted today.
With wonderful medical advances, humans are able to survive cancer and diabetes diagnoses that would have meant certain death not that long ago. And while these same medical advances and general economic prosperity mean there’s never been a better time to grow older, it also means that humans now have prolonged periods of demise that burden surviving family members. The average American lifespan has increased some 30 years since a century ago.
If a mainstream media outlet raves about a movie or a restaurant or a book, you’d expect that its reviewer did due diligence in checking it out. One would hope that the reviewer actually saw the movie or ate the meal or read the book. Why then, I wonder, does Time magazine praise a new religion website that is so essentially flawed?
